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Obama cites Michael Pollan
If I'd known about this 3 hours ago, I might have voted for him. 
This is insanely exciting. We will never get to where we need to be on energy and the environment by concentrating on transportation alone. The impact of food is hugely understated. Just the fact a potential presidential-elect is aware of the problem is a big step forward.
One other thing: I love Pollan, but I think he could have done to be a bit more pragmatic here. What's the use of a letter to the "Farmer in Chief" if he doesn't read it? Perhaps a summary could spur them to read the full text. I'm really pleased that Obama/the campaign pressed ahead and had him read it anyways.
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/11/obama-cites-michael-pollan.php
In a recent National Public Radio interview, Michael Pollan talks about how he was approached by a Democratic party staffer about his New York Times article, Farmer in Chief. The article is an open letter to the next president concerning U.S. agriculture policy. The staffer wanted Pollan to summarize the article into a page or two to get it into the hands of Barack Obama. Pollan declined, saying that if he could have said everything that needed to be said in two pages, he wouldn't have written 8000 words.
Despite the snub, it looks like the article created enough of a buzz that it made it into Obama's stack of pre-election reading material...
In an interview with Joe Klein, Obama refers to the article, explaining how Pollan's ideas fit into the concept of a new energy economy.
Obama's analysis of Pollan's message:
There is no better potential driver that pervades all aspects of our economy than a new energy economy. I was just reading an article in the New York Times by Michael Pollen about food and the fact that our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the mean time, it's creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs because they're contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity, all the things that are driving our huge explosion in healthcare costs. That's just one sector of the economy. You think about the same thing is true on transportation. The same thing is true on how we construct our buildings. The same is true across the board.
We've received no word on whether John McCain has read Pollan's article.
Note: Edited Nov 3, 2008 at 10:30 pst to reflect that Pollan was asked to write a summary of the article, not just to give his consent for someone else to summarize as I originally stated. Thanks to kendrainman in comments below.
